The Orthodox Church joined Russia's tabloids on Thursday to rally around a boxer who beat to death an alleged pedophile in a case that has captured the nation's attention.
The unlikely alliance, which also includes politicians from the ruling United Russia party, reflected growing sympathy for vigilante justice in a country where the Soviet mentality of unquestioning obedience to the state is fast fading.
The case involves a trained boxer, Alexander Kuznetsov, who on New Year's night killed a man he says he found attempting to rape his eight-year-old stepson outside their Saint Petersburg home.
The deputy head of the Orthodox Church's external relations department, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, told Interfax news agency that Kuznetsov's actions were understandable.
"A person capable of raping a child should be isolated properly, preferably forever," the cleric told Interfax.
"If that was the case then parents probably wouldn't be faced with such a tragic, terrible choice as was the father of this boy," he said.
United Russia's Saint Petersburg city council members want prosecutors, who are charging Kuznetsov with aggravated manslaughter, to accept that he suffered from "temporary insanity," Kommersant daily said.
The loudest support is coming from Russia's tabloids.
"Sasha, stand firm!" screamed the headline in the bawdy Tvoi Den daily, using the diminutive of Kuznetsov's first name. The article that follows quotes Kuznetsov's estranged wife recounting how "he loved children" and his mother praying "that they acquit him."
The mass market Komsomolsksaya Pravda meanwhile quoted neighbors describing how the alleged pedophile had been found dead with his trousers around his ankles -- supposedly proof that Kuznetsov saved his son from being raped.
The outpouring echoes the widespread sympathy expressed for Vitaly Kaloyev, an architect from North Ossetia who in 2004 knifed to death an air traffic controller in Zurich involved in a 2002 air crash that killed his family.
Although a Swiss court found him guilty he received a hero's welcome on returning to Russia last November and was handed a government job in North Ossetia last month.
Alexei Levinson, at the Levada opinion polling group, said Russians increasingly favor natural justice based on personal principles over rules set by the state.
"I think it's the misinterpretation of freedom. In Soviet times there was formality, but now there is corruption and freedom and when you put them together you get an unhealthy cocktail," Levinson said.
On Komsomolskaya Pravda's Web site, readers' messages of support were flooding in.
"Knowing our justice system, sometimes you want to go out and deliver your own justice," one anonymous entry reads. "So no one has the right to condemn [Kuznetsov]."
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